Built on Sand

"With a psychogeographer’s sensibility and a deep connection to history, Paul Scraton’s Built on Sand offers us a tender, fresh, and moving portrait of Berlin."
— Saskia Vogel, author of Permission

"Sublime… Scraton has taken the broken memories of a city, refashioning them into a novel that’s skewed and wondrous."
— Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular

"Humane and ambitious."
— Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun

"Cities are made of stories, and Paul Scraton’s novel-in-stories is wonderfully made of the city of Berlin."
— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse

"A haunted and haunting novel about the way the past is sometimes more real than the present."
– Owen Booth, author of What We’re Teaching Our Sons

"A stereoscopic vision of Berlin and the lives lived in its sunken streets, masterful in its attention to topographic history."
– Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin's Lakes

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand.

The stories of Berlin are the stories Built on Sand. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war.

Built on Sand centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. This novel offers a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.

The book, Built on Sand [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN#9781910312339 in Paperback by Paul Scraton may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.